IBM Cloud Docs
Getting started with Event Notifications

Getting started with Event Notifications

This tutorial brings you through the steps that you need to take before you create an IBM Cloud Event Notifications service.

Event Notifications is a routing service that provides you about critical events that occur in your IBM Cloud® account. You can filter and route event notifications from IBM Cloud services like IBM Cloud Monitoring, Security and Compliance Center, Secrets Manager, IBM Cloud Projects, and Toolchain to communication channels like email, SMS, push notifications, Huawei Cloud Push, webhook, slack, Microsoft® Teams, ServiceNow, IBM Cloud Functions, and IBM Cloud Object Storage.

Create an IBM Cloud account

If you don't have an IBM Cloud account, create one.

Decide on a location

Decide on a location where your service to be hosted. Currently, the following locations are supported:

  • Dallas (us-south)
  • London (eu-gb)
  • Frankfurt (eu-de)
  • Sydney (au-syd)
  • Madrid (eu-es)

Decide on a pricing plan

Based on your business requirements, decide on a pricing plan. Currently, the following plans are available: Lite, and Standard.

  • Lite: This plan gives you unlimited ingested events, 10 topics, 2 filters per topic, 5 destinations, 20 outbound emails, 20 outbound SMSes, 20 outbound webhooks, and 1000 notifications per push destination. 10 subscriptions are allowed, and a subscription can have a maximum of 3 email recipients.

  • Standard: You are charged for ingested events and for outbound digital messages. An ingested event is one that is received and filtered. If a source is connected but no filters are defined for it (that is, the source is not associated with any topic), the incoming events are dropped, and you are not charged. Outbound digital messages come in various types, and each type is priced separately.

    You can use Pre-production destination, as low-cost push destination, for your development and test environments. You can change the Pre-production destination to Production destination post completion of your development and testing. This feature is only available for Standard pricing plan.

Changing plans from a chargeable plan (Standard) to free plan (Lite) is not permitted as this may result in disruption and data loss due to the plan limitations.

Choose an event source

You can create either an API Source or an IBM Cloud source.

An API source indicates that the Event originated outside of IBM Cloud and is sent to Event Notifications service through API calls.

An IBM Cloud source indicates a service on IBM Cloud that can emit events to Event Notifications service.

The source IBM Cloud Resource Lifecycle Events is a built-in source. This source emits resource lifecycle events to Event Notifications service. This is disabled by default and needs to be enabled.

The other IBM Cloud sources have to be first integrated from the respectice services to start emitting events to Event Notifications service.

The list of IBM provided sources is as follows:

Choose an event destination

A destination is a delivery target for a notification. Two destination categories are supported: human and service.

Human destinations

Human destinations are devices, servers, or applications that present notifications for human consumption. The following human destinations are supported:

Service destinations

Service destinations are cloud services or applications where notifications are consumed programmatically. The following service destinations are supported: